Easy Way to Pick a Bad Web Host

Let's face it - web hosting is profitable and the market is crowded with people vying for your dollar. You want to spend as little as possible but you want high quality hosting. The problem is that you only really find out who is good after you've signed up and invested the labour in getting things running on their servers. Sometimes it can be a couple of months in when some issues crop up. Here's a non-technical way to differentiate good and bad hosts:

Bad Hosts Don't Sign Support Requests With a Real Name

I know, it's ridiculous. It can't be that simple. But really, it is. All bad hosts I've encountered were like this - including Segpub (Segment Publishing) and SAR Hosting as the ones I had the longest experiences with. They just sign "support dept" or nothing at all. Here's a sample email (I copied and pasted, so all the spelling / grammatical mistakes are SIC):

Hi, I have unsuspend this account.

The account was suspended because non payment and paypal payment was canceled and billing system does this all automacity.

Login at www.sar-hosting.co.uk/billing using your email and password at signup or click forgot password to be sent new password.

Regards
SAR-Hosting
Support

What are they afraid of? That I will find out that it's just one person answering all the requestse? I suspect so... I couldn't really care less to be honest as long as a host does their job.

A host that does sign emails with real names doesn't guarantee perfection. But if you want a nice simple indicator of a bad host, this one is extremely effective. The only problem is... you have to sign up before you start receiving their support request responses. Sorry I don't have the solution there... but if you're trialling a host and have a cancellation period available, then it could help.

PS: In case you are wondering, in the above quoted email, the client never missed one payment and yet SAR Hosting replaced their page with a "you need to contact us and pay your account" message without notice. Wonderful PR.